The 10-Year Treasury Yield over 5%? Some Thoughts

The economy did fine with a 10-year yield of 5-8%, including in the 1990s, amid a tight labor market and lots of economic growth.

By Wolf Richter for WOLF STREET.

The 10-year Treasury yield has been zigzagging higher since mid-November when the Fed cut its policy rates again despite accelerating inflation. Since that rate cut, followed up by another rate cut in December, the 10-year yield has risen by 80 basis points, heading, apparently inexorably, for the 5%-line.

On Friday, it closed at 4.78%, within spitting distance of 5%, despite Bessent’s three hocus-pocus shows to try to bring it down. Sure, they might have helped keeping a lid on long-term yields, as Bessent pointed out; who knows where the 10-year yield would be by now without the hocus-pocus shows. Maybe already over 5%?

The 10-year yield is now 115 basis points above the Effective Federal Funds Rate (EFFR, blue line), which the Fed targets with its policy rates. Note the November rate cut – the drop in the blue line – despite accelerating inflation. That’s when the zigzag higher began.

Buyers and sellers in the bond market have good reasons for pushing up the 10-year yield: Inflation refuses to go back into the bottle. The Fed refuses to force inflation back into the bottle, triggering loose financial conditions in most areas of the economy, except in real estate. And the government refuses to even entertain a modicum of spending cuts and tax hikes to contain the deficits. It’s been the opposite: tax cuts and spending hikes, and they’re still talking in those terms.

The government’s unwillingness to contain the deficit causes a flood of supply of new debt needed to fund the deficits. The bond market has to absorb that new debt by luring in new buyers with higher yields – investors that are now sitting on the sidelines watching this play out. If yields move high enough, these investors will begin to nibble, and if yields move higher still, these investors will nibble some more, and if yields move a lot higher still, investors might take big bites. Some of those investors have been nibbling, but the supply keeps coming, and so the 10-year yield keeps rising.

Those reasons for pushing the 10-year yield higher aren’t going away anytime soon as neither the Fed nor the government is willing to do what it takes.

The 10-year yield had already breached the 5%-line for a few moments intraday on October 23, 2023, but that was too fast too soon, after a massive surge of 170 basis points in six months. And at 5%, the nibblers started taking out huge bites, and the sellers stopped selling, with the spectacular effect that the yield plunged by 19 basis points intraday, from 5.02% to 4.83%.

That day is circled in the chart above, showing only the closing yields. The yield then continued to plunge for the next two months, and that’s how that run for 5% ended.

Here is the hourly spectacle on October 23, 2023:

A 10-year Treasury yield above 5% and well-above 5%, was essentially the norm in the decades before 2008, before QE. Between the mid-1960s and the Dotcom Bust recession, the 10-year yield was nearly always higher than 5%, going as high as 15%. So 5% isn’t anything unusual or unheard of. For several decades, it used to be considered low.

The exception occurred during the Dotcom Bust that was hitting the economy, to which the Fed responded by cutting its policy rates as low as 1%, and kept them there too long, causing Housing Bubble 1 to bloom, which ended in the Housing Bust, which triggered the mortgage crisis, which triggered the Financial Crisis. During that time, starting in June 2002 through April 2006, the 10-year yield dropped below 5%, and stayed mostly below 5%, and for part of the time even below 4%. Then it went back over 5% again, when the Housing Bust and the Fed’s reaction to the budding Financial Crisis pushed the yield back below 5%. But it didn’t drop below 4% until the Fed started QE in 2008.

The 30-year Treasury yield hasn’t been so constrained by an imaginary line that formed some kind of ceiling, where the masses come out and buy. It has zigzagged past its October 23, 2023 high, to a two-decade high. On Friday, it closed at 5.24%.

The 10-year Treasury yield looks like it wants to break out – it looks like it already made the first step to breaking out, by leaving behind its two-month range from 4.62% to 4.72%. At some point, sooner or later, given the history of the 10-year yield, the buyers and sellers in the bond market will make another run at 5%.

The big question that arises is this: Will the same thing that happened on October 23, 2023, happen all over again, when huge demand suddenly comes off the fence at that long-awaited 5%, while sellers, shocked and appalled, pull back, thereby causing the yield to plunge again?

Or will the 10-year yield blow through the 5% — with fretting sellers burning through the worried and careful buyers — and head higher, and remain above 5%?

The government’s fiscal policies are asking for it. The Fed’s policies of being soft on inflation are asking for it. The $40 trillion in Treasury debt outstanding is asking for it.

A 10-year yield of 5%+ is obviously not the end of the world. The US economy has done fine with a 5%+ yield, including during the Dotcom Bubble, which generated a very tight labor market, big pay increases, and lots of economic growth despite a 10-year yield mostly in the range between 5-8%.

And the ratio of interest payments to tax receipts that are available to pay for them was much higher from the mid-1980s through the mid-1990s (see my analysis: Quarterly Update on the Ugly Fiscal Condition of the US in Q2 2026).